page_title: History of Germans in Poland
hierarchical_section_title: History of Germans in Poland
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Ausschnitt der „Sprachenkarte von Deutschland“ Andrées Weltatlas 1880. Nach dem Scannen wurden die Farben aufgefrischt, aber ihre Verteilung wurde in keiner Weise verändert. English: Detail of a language map of Germany, which is part of a German atlas, printed in 1880. The colours have been cleaned, but their localization has not at all been changed.
context_page_description: The history of Germans in Poland dates back almost a millennium.
  Poland was at one point the largest kingdom in Europe; it was also Europe's most multiethnic state during the medieval period.
  It covered an immense plain with no natural boundaries, with a thinly scattered population of many ethnic groups, including the Poles themselves, Germans in the cities of West Prussia, and Ruthenians in Lithuania. 5-10% of immigrants were German settlers.
  The Polish princes granted the Germans in the cities complete autonomy according to the "Teutonic right", modeled on the laws of the cities of ancient Rome. In this way, cities emerged of the German-Western European medieval type. Before the 13th century ended, around one hundred Polish towns had been transformed into Magdeburg-style municipal institutions. The governing classes in these towns were increasingly German and German-speaking. At the synod of Łęczyca in 1285, Archbishop Jakub Świnka of Gniezno warned that Poland might become a "new Saxony" if German negligence for Polish language, customs, clergy and ordinary people went unchecked.
context_section_description: The history of Germans in Poland dates back almost a millennium.
  Poland was at one point the largest kingdom in Europe; it was also Europe's most multiethnic state during the medieval period.
  It covered an immense plain with no natural boundaries, with a thinly scattered population of many ethnic groups, including the Poles themselves, Germans in the cities of West Prussia, and Ruthenians in Lithuania. 5-10% of immigrants were German settlers. (In the Middle Ages, there was no homogeneous German state; by "German", we refer to German-speaking people, including Germanized Polabian Slavs and Lusatian Sorbs.) 
  The Polish princes granted the Germans in the cities complete autonomy according to the "Teutonic right" (later, "Magdeburg right"), modeled on the laws of the cities of ancient Rome. In this way, cities emerged of the German-Western European medieval type.  Before the 13th century ended, around one hundred Polish towns had been transformed into Magdeburg-style municipal institutions. (Adoption of Magdeburg laws should not be equated with German colonization in Poland, as the laws were used in many places inhabited solely by Poles.)  The governing classes in these towns were increasingly German and German-speaking.  At the synod of Łęczyca in 1285, Archbishop Jakub Świnka of Gniezno warned that Poland might become a "new Saxony" if German negligence for Polish language, customs, clergy and ordinary people went unchecked. By the end of the Middle Ages, significant populations in a number of western Polish cities were German-speaking, and some municipal documents were written partly in German (until the transition to Latin, and later to Polish).
  After the mass-expulsions following the west-shift of Poland and the Polish takeover of the Former eastern territories of Germany that had been overwhelmingly German-speaking, many millions of Germans were expelled from within today's Polish borders.
caption: Traditional German and Polish language distribution before Ethnic cleansings of the 20th century
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